City of Kamloops survey finds decline in satisfaction with residents pointing to crime, homelessness

KAMLOOPS — The contention that residents are feeling less settled about life in Kamloops now has some data to back it up.

Kamloops council received the 2022 Citizen Satisfaction Survey at its regular meeting Tuesday (Jan. 17). The survey was conducted by Forum Research, using interviews after making telephone calls to randomly-selected numbers.

The survey shows 83 per cent of respondents feel their quality of life is good. That’s on par with other Canadian municipalities, but down from 95 per cent in 2019, the last time the survey was taken.

“This net good decline, it’s not a unique finding to Kamloops,” Forum’s Winsome Stec told council. “We are seeing that municipalities across all of Canada, they’ve been seeing this decline, as well, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

By far, the most prominent areas where respondents felt their quality of life was worsening were homelessness and poverty (46 per cent) and increased crime (45 per cent). Those areas were significantly more pronounced than in 2019 (14 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively).

Even more troubling was the city’s performance in Forum’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), which subtracts the percentage of Kamloops detractors from those who would promote the city. The most recent survey described 38 per cent of respondents as detractors and 22 per cent as promoters, leaving Kamloops with a score of -16. In 2019, Kamloops came out with a much more positive score of +14.

Council will now take the findings and interpret them as it works to define its strategic priorities for the future.

A few around the council table Tuesday made their feelings known about how the results should be interpreted.

“In a lot of these reports, you keep hearing, ‘It’s the same all over. It’s the same all over Canada. It’s the same all over, in every community,’ when it’s really not,” said Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson. “I think it’s time that we start focusing on our own community. Maybe we can be a leader in that.”

Councillor Stephen Karpuk noted the areas with which local residents are most dissatisfied are within the purview of upper levels of government, and council can use the survey information to lobby for change.

“We have those issues, concerns in our community but they are not in our lane,” Karpuk told council. “We’ve been told multiple times as new council — and past council — ‘stay in your lane.’ That’s not say we can’t effect those changes — and we can ask of our higher levels of government that have the ability to effect change in our community — but this is where I think we really need to focus.”

“I don’t believe that we should say in our own lane,” Hamer-Jackson countered. “Go figure.”